>>But this one isn't just a detail (and, besides, someone else posted it as their own peeve today) - it's something that first confused me, then amused me, then started to annoy me. And I actually didn't notice it until I heard it a few dozen times. One of those where I started thinking that this doesn't make sense was a sentence where "...we should try and understand the guy" - what good would the understanding do after the trial and hanging, eh?
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>When I hear that I understand what the person is saying. I see your point but I don't analyse each word and stick it together I just see the meaning of the sentence. Its interesting how language is different for different people. I know that my wife who studied language will often not understand something that I do understand. And I suppose sometimes I may not get the correct meaning.

Yes, despite our firm conviction that languages are 1% logic and 99% history, observing my kids learn them, and remembering how I learned them (including the first one, language, that is), we do seek logic. I've always tried to make sense out of what I learned, to glean a rule that I could apply to the next case so I wouldn't have to ask anybody what does this mean and appear ignorant/stupid.

But people don't think of their children when they make the language. So much of the knowledge we need to gain in order to function in this world is actually rubbish that entered the language, courtesy of various morons who were important at the time and thus imitated by the masses. So you get strawberries which have nothing to do with straw, butterflies which are totally unrelated to butter, you got premises which have nothing to do with syllogisms but you can be removed from them by force, you get cousins which can be removed or not (depending on the diagnose, I assume), you get a person who is a chair, you get a word which means two opposite things, you get opposing word pairs which mean the same, and all sorts of nonsense.

(rant=on is in config.fpw inside the exe on this one, can't remove it, source lost ;)